July 2022. France is hit by a heat wave. However, it is at this time that the activity of climatosceptics develops. “A large French denialist community was structured in the summer of 2022 on Twitter”, underline four scientists from the Institute of Complex Systems Paris Ile-de-France (CNRS), in their study published Monday, February 13. Now, more than 10,000 active accounts relay this false information, with thousands of daily tweets.
To arrive at these results, the four scientists sifted through two years of exchanges on Twitter, in 2021 and 2022. Their study is part of the Climatoscope project which has analyzed, since 2016, more than 400 million tweets about climate change. “Previously, France was much less affected by climatoscepticism than the United States. But, between 2021 and the summer of 2022, the activity of denialist accounts increased sixfold,” notes with of the world David Chavalarias, first author of the study, research director at the CNRS and director of the Institute of Complex Systems.
“From July, climate skeptics come out of the shadows and become one of the most active communities in the climate twittosphere”, warns David Chavalarias. According to the authors of this study, the “denialist” community on Twitter, in other words that which rejects facts benefiting from a consensus within the competent scientific community, “is mainly composed of accounts that have participated in numerous anti-system protest campaigns. /antivax during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Accounts that “relay Kremlin propaganda”
“The transition was made at the time of the invasion of Ukraine and he relayed pro-Putin propaganda for a time”, they observe. Of the 10,000 accounts, “nearly 6,000 relayed Kremlin propaganda about the war in Ukraine,” the report noted. Three current events have facilitated this “transition”: a series of extreme events, such as heat waves, fires or drought, the holding of COP27 in Egypt with a strong weight of fossil industries and finally the convergence of the challenges of global warming with those of security of oil and gas supply due to the war in Ukraine. In addition, after buying Twitter, Elon Musk decided to close moderation services and began to restore suspended accounts.
If “a significant proportion of accounts are involved in the informational sphere of Reconquête!” however, “the denialist community is not made up a priori of political activists belonging to traditional parties”, specifies the report.
The “transition” is illustrated in this report by the account @Elpis_R, whose activity on Twitter has more than doubled since the summer of 2022, “probably because it acts on favorable ground, where an entire community is already predisposed to listen to anti-system and conspiratorial speeches”, note the authors.
After a long period of antivax activism and a phase “where it was the discreet relay of pro-Kremlin propaganda”, this anonymous account has been attacking, since June 2022, specifically IPCC authors and climate scientists. He intends to “return the image of an ‘expert’ claiming to read thousands of articles, with many very technical tweets which take out of context or distort the results of academic articles”.
A third of accounts evoking the climate “climatodénialistes”
The proportion of inauthentic accounts (driven by humans or robots) within the French “denialist” community is “2.8 times higher than that of the French IPCC community” while “the proportion of accounts suspended by Twitter is as for it ten times higher”, also note the authors of the study.
At the global level, this time, “the denialist community has an overrepresentation of accounts with inauthentic behavior of + 71% compared to pro-climate communities, with 6% of ‘probably bot’ accounts”. The proportion of Twitter accounts with inauthentic behavior in exchanges has therefore experienced “a sharp increase” since 2019 on a global scale, they observe. In total, the global debate on climate change on Twitter “is strongly bipolarized with around 30% of ‘climatodenialists’ among Twitter accounts that address climate issues”.
The consequences are not negligible. “The discourse on Twitter of denialist and techno-solutionist communities probably hinders the dissemination of scientific knowledge and the conclusions of the IPCC by negatively affecting the online activity of scientists in climate science and climate change”, regret the authors of this article. study of the Climatoscope project.
“Even if the size of this community is smaller than that which supports the scientific consensus on the climate, a process has begun, alerts David Chavalarias to of the world. If we are not aware of it, it can lead to a polarization of society on issues that relate to science, as in the United States, where the Republicans are mainly climate skeptics.